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I'm happy to announce the launch of malpais.app, a free NEXRAD/TDWR radar viewer that lives in your browser. malpais downloads Level 2 or Level 3 data from NOAA's Open Data Dissemination archives and renders it in WebGL on your desktop or mobile device. For free.

malpais.app can be used to look at realtime Level 2 or Level 3 data products, or you can use it to look at archived radar data. If you think a storm looks like something from May 3, 1999, you can punch in the date and look at the historical data.

In addition to the radar data, malpais.app includes displays of the current severe weather related watches and warnings from the NWS and the current aviation hazards: SIGMETS, G-AIRMETS, and AIRMETS, from the Aviation Weather Center.

To help orientate yourself, malpais.app includes US county borders, interstate highways, airport locations, airspace boundaries, VOR locations and runways. malpais has been tested on Chrome and Safari on both desktop and mobile browsers. (Honestly, desktop is better for now).

If you have any questions, comments, bug reports (I did a lot of regression testing on the NIDS parser, but I wasn't able to evaluate the entire corpus of NEXRAD data), please let me know at rob@malpais.app. Or send me a message.

For the curious, malpais (mal-PIE-ess or mal-PIE-ee) are lava fields found in NM. At the surface, malpais are chaotic landscapes (hence their name, badlands), but as you zoom out from above, structure appears. This is analogous to looking at radar data of thunderstorms.